The plaque by Antoine Carteret is a rare example of a signed work by the artist and dates to the earlier part of his career. Like so many contemporary Geneva enamels, the composition is evocative of the paintings of Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789). In fact, although it contains so many elements familiar from Vernet’s works, such as the creek with distant shipping overlooked by a ruined tower, with fishermen on flat rocks in the foreground, the work appears to have been a pastiche composed by Carteret. The fact that he signed it suggests he was proud of the composition.
Although Jacqueline de Ribes, fashion designer, writer and patron of the arts, and often hailed as “the last queen of Paris”, was perhaps better known to the general public than her banker husband, Edouard, who died in 2013, it was his family who had provided the opulent setting for her beauty. Six generations earlier an ancestor had given financial advice to the newly restored Louis XVIII, for which he had been ennobled. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the family continued to thrive and grow rich, furnishing their hôtel particulier in Paris with the finest paintings and works of art. The small but choice collection of gold boxes appears to have been a particular interest of the most recent comte and comtesse, who added a number of examples

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